As fate would have it it, this song came up on the ol’ bathroom iPod yesterday, the very day that JC turned 77. 52 years after the first VU album, he’s still out there doing his thing — there he is on the Instagram, futzing around in a recording studio. Cale won’t quit as long as he’s vertical, and I for one take comfort in that.

My reading for the second half of our Morocco trip was Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which seemed like a fairly appropriate pairing. The book is a sort of thinking-man’s Western and parts of Morocco resemble the American Southwest, particularly Arizona and New Mexico. I am less familiar with the even more arid Texas/Mexico region in which Blood Meridian is set, but surely it is not too dissimilar to parts of the Sahara.

McCarthy’s is a much-revered name among modern writers; Harold Bloom, defender of the Western canon, blurbed Blood Meridian as “the major esthetic achievement of any living American writer,” while heavy hitter John Banville said that it “reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby-Dick.”

And yes, the man can write. The following passage on page 20 made me sit up straight in my chair: Read more »

This post is being written in Casablanca, Morocco, which so far is nothing like you see in the movies. It is a weird combination of breezy beach town and bustling modern city on the go. Yesterday’s itinerary included a visit to the local FedEx, where the workers were super helpful and friendly, which is very Morocco, and then the credit card machine was broken – which is also very Morocco. But all was sorted out and the package is, hopefully, winging its way back to the U.S. even now.

But my subject here today is not travelogue, it is literature. My reading for the first part of the trip was Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, which – despite being written three years after Stranger in a Strange Land – is one of Heinlein’s light entertainments, not one of his philosophical blockbusters. But it is still slyly subversive, not least because it is written from the perspective of an 18-year-old girl (8 in Mars years), over the stenuous objections of Heinlein’s publishers. A female protagonist was unheard of in science fiction in 1953, a good 26 years before Alien.Read more »

So I just saw this video for the first time in… hmm… 35 years? Hard to believe it’s been that long since the golden age of MTV, but that’s what the math says.

I never forgot this song, which is a four-minute blast of relentless forward momentum that always gets me hyped. But I had forgotten about the video, which is a perfect visual analog: The camera never stops moving, the people never stop running. Ah, all that youthful energy…. Watching it makes me feel 17 again for a minute. Or four.

Of course after seeing this I had to run out and buy the album, which was not that good. It had one other catchy track and the rest was filler. After that Belfegore disappeared into the crevices of history, never to be seen again.

Congratulate me, I finished two books this week: George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. And though they are very different books, written by very different people in very different places at very different times, I found some commonality.

For one thing, [spoiler alert, spoiler alert] main characters in both die of typhoid. In the event, this was during the week the wife and I were taking pills to prevent that very thing from happening to during our trip to Morocco (which is why I was reading The Sheltering Sky in the first place). In fact mortality is a main theme of both books, though Saunders manages to be somewhat uplifting in the process, while Bowles is pretty grim — in a refined literary way, of course.

And I’d love to share more of my penetrating analysis, but departure time is at hand. Check two off the list, anyway.

A tweet from Matador Records today alerted me to the fact that Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was released on this day in 1994, making it 25 years old.

At the time, this was an album that took me by surprise. I was one of the few in my peer group who hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid on Pavement’s first album, Slanted and Enchanted. In historic perspective Slanted is a great record — I stand corrected on that one — but still I approached Crooked Rain with some skepticism.

It didn’t last long. Crooked Rain is a masterpiece right from its opening seconds, in which a loose, shambling agglomeration of guitar and drum noises starts, stops, starts again, and eventually resolves itself into a towering, monumentally catchy riff. From there it’s off to the races:

And I don’t necessarily want to get into a whole thing about Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain today — it’s one of my all-time favorites, and I don’t have time to do it justice. (You can read good, lengthy takes here and here.) But it’s just the leading edge of a wave of stuff that will be turning 25 this year, including Pulp Fiction, Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and a whole bunch of great albums:

Laurie Anderson: Bright Red/Tightrope

The Beastie Boys: Ill Communication

Beck: Mellow Gold

Frank Black: Teenager of the Year

Cake: Motorcade of Generosity

Gang Starr: Hard to Earn

The Jesus & Mary Chain: Stoned and Dethroned

Love and Rockets: Hot Trip to Heaven

G. Love and Special Sauce: G. Love and Special Sauce

Portishead: Dummy

The Roots: Do You Want More?!!!??!

The Silver Jews: Starlite Walker

Soundgarden: Superunknown

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: Orange

That Petrol Emotion: Fireproof

They Might Be Giants: John Henry

Uncle Tupelo: Anodyne

Ween: Chocolate and Cheese

Holy hell, that’s a lot of great music for one year, and all over the map too. Anyone who want to talk trash about the 90s will have me to contend with — you know where to find me.

Today’s song of the week comes in six parts, the first of which dates to 1969, when a Belgian pop-rock group called the Wallace Collection recorded a song called “Daydream” (not to be confused with the contemporaneous Lovin’ Spoonful hit of the same name):

According to Ye Olde Wikipedia,

The song was a hit in mainland Europe, though popularity didn’t make it to English speaking countries, despite its use of English lyrics.

Apparently some of the melody was lifted from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, which would take this history all the way back to 1876. But Philistine that I am, I will leave the classical stuff to those with longer attention spans. Read more »

Recently I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: took an inventory of all the books I’ve acquired but haven’t read. It’s not a pretty picture. The total comes to 60-some titles and thousands upon thousands of pages. But at least now I have an idea of the scope of the problem, and can begin to take steps to address it.

The first one, of course, is to stop the inflow. To that end I am pledging publicly to acquire no more books for the duration of calendar year 2019, except for Chris O’Leary’s giant Bowie book Ashes to Ashes, which I already have on preorder.

The immediate goal is to finish all of the several books I am in the middle of before leaving for Morocco in mid-February. Then after returning home at the beginning of March I’ll start to deal with The Pile.

So why am I telling you this? Partly because writing about something is a way to make it real. And partly because I hope to write some about what I’m reading, as that seems to be the only way I really remember anything anymore. You are excused in advance for not being interested (though I am always looking for fellow-travelers, so do be in touch if anything strikes a chord).